Tennent Bagley - obituary

Tennent Bagley was a CIA officer who was at the heart of a Soviet spy case
that might have turned the Cold War hot

Tennent Bagley, who has died aged 88, led the CIA’s counterintelligence activities against the Soviet Union during the early years of the Cold War and was one of the most respected experts on Soviet espionage; but in 2007 he published a book in which he claimed that Yuri Nosenko, seen as one of the most important Soviet defectors of the post-war years, had been a KGB plant.

Codenamed “Foxtrot’’ by the CIA, Nosenko, the son of one of Stalin’s ministers, first approached the CIA in June 1962 when he was serving as a KGB “escort officer” for a delegation attending a disarmament conference in Geneva. Nosenko offered to provide the Americans with information, saying that he hoped to defect some time in the future, his principal short-term objective being to replace funds he had misappropriated from the local rezidentura — money of which he had been relieved by a prostitute the night before.

Nosenko was persuaded to continue working in the KGB, but in the meantime he made some significant disclosures. He revealed that the KGB had compromised a British official who had been caught in a honeytrap in Moscow while employed at the British embassy; MI5 soon identified the suspect as the Admiralty clerk, John Vassall. He also named the Canadian ambassador, John Watkins, as having been compromised in the same way, as well as a CIA officer, Edward Ellis Smith. All three allegations proved accurate.

Yuri Nosenko

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After these initial contacts, Nosenko returned to Moscow, but two years later, in February 1964, he unexpectedly defected during a second visit to Geneva. It was three months after President Kennedy’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald, and Nosenko came with astonishing information which seemed to throw a bucketful of cold water on theories that the KGB had been involved. When Oswald had turned up in Moscow in 1959, it turned out, Nosenko had been asked to consider Oswald’s application for asylum, but had rejected him as “too unstable”.

Nosenko’s revelation marked a crucial moment in the Cold War, an apparent intelligence breakthrough that may have prevented America concluding that Moscow was behind the JFK assassination, and embarking on a nuclear conflict. But what if Nosenko was a fraud?

Bagley had been the first to interview Nosenko in 1962, when he was convinced of Nosenko’s bona fides: “Only an insider could have spoken so easily about secret Soviet places, KGB people unknown to the general public, and secret operations,” he recalled. Some of what Nosenko had told him repeated what the Americans had already learned from Anatoly Golitsyn, who had defected from the KGB six months earlier.

The trouble was that Golitsyn, in addition to providing valuable leads about Soviet spies in the West, had brought with him a terrifying, overarching theory that Moscow was involved in implementing a vast conspiracy to achieve world dominance. Western intelligence agencies were riddled with high-level moles, he claimed; every defector was a KGB plant, and every Kremlin overture had a nefarious purpose.

At the height of Cold War paranoia, the theory seemed plausible and Bagley’s boss, James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s head of counter-intelligence — fell for it hook, line and sinker. “This is the one I warned you about,” Golitsyn told Angleton when he learned Nosenko’s identity in 1964. “This is the man who has come to discredit me.”

When Bagley returned to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, he was taken aside by Angleton, who soon managed to convince him that Nosenko must be a plant dispatched by the KGB to divert the CIA from pursuing real threats. In April 1964 Nosenko was placed in solitary confinement and a subjected to “hostile interrogation” to get him to confess.

In what the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky has described as “the most shameful page in the history of the CIA”, Nosenko remained in isolation for more than three years, during which he was subjected to many of the interrogation techniques now familiar from Guantánamo Bay. But as Bagley himself recalled: “Even when he’d been shown — and admitted — that his stories were impossible to believe, he never confessed”.

In order to prove his thesis that Nosenko was a fraud, Bagley wrote a report listing “anomalies” in Nosenko’s account of his own life that came to be known as “The Thousand Pager”. Nosenko, he wrote, had falsely claimed to have a higher rank in the KGB than he actually had; and was inconsistent about the details of his career and about some of the spy cases he had handled.

The argument about whether Nosenko was genuine or a KGB plant split the agency into two hostile camps, with Bagley’s critics maintaining that the (mostly minor) inconsistencies in Nosenko’s account could be easily attributed to the well-attested fact that he was a hard-drinking womaniser with a tendency to exaggerate.

Eventually, an internal CIA investigation dismissed Golitsyn as paranoid and cleared Nosenko, who was released in 1969 and fully exonerated in 1978, with the CIA’s then director Admiral Stansfield Turner denouncing his detractors as a “group of agency paranoids”.

Having lost the in-house debate about Nosenko (who went on to work as a CIA consultant), Bagley went into retirement determined to prove that he had been right all along. His efforts bore fruit in 2007 with the publication of Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games (2007), in which he depicted Nosenko as a KGB “provocateur and dissembler” and claimed that the CIA’s willingness to believe him had affected its ability to resist and ferret out Soviet penetration operations well into the 1980s.

The book convinced some people, a reviewer in the Washington Post claiming that: “Many readers will conclude that Angleton was right all along — that Nosenko was a phoney, sent by the KGB to deceive a gullible CIA.” However, others felt that the book was an attempt by Bagley to justify the appalling way Nosenko had been treated.

The Nosenko case has been described as “one of the great unresolved mysteries of the Cold War” and the full story may never be known as Nosenko himself died in 2008. A month before his death, however, the CIA director Michael Hayden paid him a visit, bringing a ceremonial flag and official letter of thanks.

Tennent Harrington Bagley was born on November 11 1925, in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of an admiral in the US Navy. After service in the Marine Corps in the Second World War he took a degree in Political Science at the University of Southern California and later a doctorate at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.

He joined the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency in 1950 and by the 1960s had been promoted to deputy chief of the Soviet bloc division. In 1967 Bagley became CIA station chief in Brussels, holding the post until his retirement in 1972.

Bagley’s other books include KGB: Masters of the Soviet Union (1990, with Peter Deriabin) and Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief, based on the reminiscences of Sergey Kondrashev, which was published last year

Bagley is survived by his wife, Maria, and by their son and two daughters.